"Do you remember everything I said?"
Finally coming to his senses from his trance, Xia De looked at everything in front of him with some confusion. In the last second of his memory, he was helping his friend deal with his funeral, and in the next second of his memory, he came here.
This is a bedroom... definitely not a bedroom from the 21st century. The bright yellow light in the room is not very strong, the dark wooden floor is still clean, but the walls are a bit yellowed. There is a pile of books in the corner, tilted as if it is about to fall, and on the bookshelf next to the pile of books are some metal pots and photo frames.
Those photos are all in black and white.
In addition to the paintings on the wall, there are two metal pipes. You can vaguely see that the buckle connecting the pipes is a little rusty, and one of the thinner pipes branches out at the desk. The brown wooden desk is full of paper pages, and the drawers on both sides are half open, and you can see the documents and papers inside.
On the desk, the table lamp connected to the brass pipe was still glowing. The trumpet-shaped design of the heavy table lamp was very novel.
"Hmm? Not electric light? Gas light?"
It was difficult to tell whether it was a gas lamp by looking at it, but the pipes clinging to the wall and the wall lamps connected to the pipes were definitely not electric lamps. The warm yellow light was not bright and could only illuminate the area around the desk, but it inexplicably made Xia De feel warm.
With this light, he saw the decorative paintings on the wall, the black and white photos of a person on the desk, and the newspaper spread out in the shadow of the floor. He couldn't see anything on the newspaper, but he could see that it was not Chinese characters, but letters.
This feeling of the times makes it feel like no matter where this place is, it is no longer my hometown.
There was a smell of corruption in the air, but it was more like the smell of a funeral home. Xia De remembered this smell, after all, just a moment ago, he was still helping his friend who had unfortunately passed away... ...
"Do you remember everything I said?"
The voice sounded again, and Xia De finally woke up from his trance. The young man reacted quickly and felt someone grabbing his right wrist. At this moment, his consciousness and body were completely integrated, so he lowered his head.
He was standing by the bed in what seemed to be a nineteenth-century man's bedroom. The bed was a four-poster bed, but only three sides were draped with curtains. The bed and the visible part of the headboard all gleamed metallically under the bedside gas lamp.
The bedside lamp looked like it was held up by a little angel, and Xia De was attracted by the exquisite shape for a moment.
The person holding his hand was the man lying on the bed. This middle-aged man, who might be the owner of the bedroom, was wearing dark plaid pajamas, and everything except his head and right hand was hidden under the quilt.
The face was obviously white, but his eyes were sunken, his cheeks drooped, and his right hand holding Shade's wrist was frighteningly skinny. He looked like someone who was about to starve to death. Shade even believed that if he spoke a little louder, he would have to beg the man not to die.
Xia De knows nothing now and needs to understand the situation from the man.
"So... this is a time travel?"
He thought to himself that he had a general understanding of the current situation.
Fortunately, although the man on the bed was weak, at least there was no corpse spot on his body. Otherwise, Xia De would really be worried about his current situation.
"Do you remember everything I said?"
The weak man on the bed asked for the third time, his brown eyes sunken in his eye sockets, but staring at Xia De. Although Xia De didn't understand why he came here inexplicably, at least he knew that it was best to continue acting at this moment, at least to understand the current situation and then make plans for the future.
He opened his mouth to speak, only to realize that the other person was not speaking Chinese, nor any language he knew, but Xia De could understand it inexplicably. He wanted to answer in the other person's language, but opened his mouth slightly, he could understand but couldn't speak at all.
"No way? You can understand but you can't speak?"
For a moment, his ears began to buzz and his back started to itch due to tension. Not being able to speak the language of the inhabitants of another world was something he had not expected. This was the worst possible situation.
There was a buzzing sound in his head, and he immediately realized that the sound was not caused by his nervousness. He understood the voice in his head. It was a woman, a woman speaking, and it was a whispering sound:
In the sixth era, the year 1853 of the Universal Calendar, in summer, on a shining silver moon day, you came to this dark world. You knew you needed an identity, so you had to inherit everything from this inexplicable body. Now was the first step, to prove that you could enter this world.
"Tie... ... "
My instinctive reaction was that this was the legendary system, but I immediately realized that this was definitely not a system.
The woman's voice was unusually elegant and soothing, like a murmur of poetry, intoxicating. But the language she used was different from Chinese and the language of the weak man on the bed.
The language was even more ancient and profound, like a breeze from ancient times, passing through the curtain of time and suddenly blowing into the present. Language itself was a concrete mystery, and even if he only understood the meaning of the language, Shade seemed to have seen the deepest darkness.
Although Shad understood this second language, just understanding this language made his head buzz and his new body's stomach produce a nauseating reaction.
This is a feeling of mental oppression. The language used by the voice in the head itself has extraordinary power.
"This is the language of this world! The one in the head is not a system, this is something that originally existed in the body!"
Xia De made a judgment, his pupils shrank slightly, and he made a more terrifying guess from what he saw:
"The new world, this world that seems to be the Victorian Steam Age, is a world where the extraordinary and mysterious exist!"
He was not the kind of person who would not accept the status quo. Since time travel had already happened, the existence of the extraordinary was not something that he could not accept. However, his first task now was to figure out the current situation, answer the man's questions, and figure out his own identity.
So, Xia De tried his best to convey the information to the voice in his head in his own language:
“Whoever you are, please listen carefully. I want to accept everything about this body, but I don’t have this body’s memories, nor do I have this body’s language habits.”
Now, you have it.
It was as if a brick had been forced into his head and stirred maliciously. Xia De thought it was a miracle that he didn't pass out.
He did not get the memories of his original body, but was forced to have some knowledge about the "Dlarion Kingdom language, the common language of the human beings in the Northern Kingdom". But this knowledge just existed, like a translator, he was not able to immediately understand all the slang, dialects, religious culture, allusions or language habits.
"I'm sorry sir, I'm not in a good state. Could you please repeat what you asked me to remember?"
Relying on this knowledge, he intermittently translated Chinese into the "northern human common language" of the alien world, and then deliberately spoke it in a translator's voice. The weak man holding Xia De's hand suddenly exerted force. It was hard to imagine that such a thin wrist had such strength:
"You are still like this, your brain is not working well... Okay, I'll say it again..."
It seemed that the original owner of this body was not very smart, so Xia De's words did not arouse suspicion for the time being.
"Shade..."
The names are pronounced in a similar way.
"I am about to die. I knew I was going to die three months in advance, so I chose you from the homeless. I changed your life, gave you a new name, and taught you to read and understand some common sense. After I die, you will get everything from me, my detective agency, and all my property. But you need to do one thing for me, a very simple thing—"
Although his tone was very weak, his terrifying eyes stared at Shade like a dying lone wolf. The great terror revealed in his eyes frightened the outsider who didn't know much about this world.
But Xia De tried to keep his breathing steady, but he didn't have the courage to look him in the eye. It wasn't because Xia De was scared at the moment, but from the words just now, he had a preliminary understanding of the situation of the original owner of the body.
Therefore, at this moment, he should definitely not look at the man, but should look away in fear, which is in line with the known character settings.
"Inherit my detective agency. No matter what you do with it, at least keep it open. Until three months later, on September 5, 1853, you will receive a letter. Take the letter back and burn it. This is the price you pay for my entire inheritance."
His hand tightly grasped Xia De's hand. Even though Xia De pretended to struggle slightly according to his acting skills, he did not think that he could break free. The other party was really strong:
"This is all I, Sparrow Hamilton, ask for in leaving my inheritance to you, Shad Hamilton."